I Promise
by wujy
Summary: An evening at a ball for Igor and Vitolya Karkaroff.
A/N: Season Four / Round One / Quidditch League / Kenmare Kestrals / Keeper
Prompt: An ordinary day in the life of a Death Eater with his/her family.  
Chosen Death Eater: Igor Karkaroff

* * *

The grand ballroom at Malfoy manor was stiflingly hot, Igor presumed to visit as much misery and discomfort upon the captive guests as possible. His wife's most effective Drying Charms were doing less and less to hide the sweat stains he was wearing into his dress robes with each fresh casting, and the humidity was beginning to give him a migraine just behind his left eye. Vitolya was next to him, trying to discreetly dab at his brow with a monogrammed handkerchief.

" _Igor_ ," she whispered in Bulgarian as quietly as she could, " _try to relax, my dove. The vein in your temple is throbbing_."

Igor tugged at the collar of his dressed robes to try releasing some of the pent up heat. His eyes darted around the room nervously, and he answered his wife without looking directly at her or moving his mouth.

" _I just don't understand why we even need to be here_ ," he replied to her. " _The war is over, and we all did things we aren't proud of to save our own hides. These parties serve no purpose other than to further inflate Lucius' ego_. "

" _You're the one who has been concerned about appearances_ ," Vitolya reminded him patiently, snagging a flute of champagne from a silver tray floating past unaccompanied. She passed the delicate glass to her husband, and he held it without drinking.

"Outside _appearances_ ," he objected. " _What we did was treasonous and we barely escaped persecution for it. We need to monitor how we appear to the outside world, not how we appear to each other. I know what monster Lucius' facade hides. What stench his cologne masks._ "

" _Perhaps_ ," his wife conceded gently, in her calm tone, " _but he knows yours, as well, and working yourself into a frenzy doesn't help anyone. Anyway, you shouldn't let Semyon see you upset like this_ ," she added with a calculated tension in her voice.

Igor frowned then and glanced around slightly. " _Where_ is _Semyon_?" he asked his wife. Igor had been so wrapped up in his discomfort that he hadn't noticed the boy leaving their side.

" _Off with the Malfoy boy, and a few others_ ," she said, sounding unconcerned. " _Probably crawling under tables and stealing cakes_."

Igor scowled. " _I don't like the idea of Semyon mixing with those delinquents_ ," he expressed, but his wife turned and fixed him with her first non-neutral look of the evening. With a fire in her eyes and a scowl to rival his own, she began her whispered scolding.

" _They are_ children, _Iggy_ ," she said, using a diminutive of his name that she knew he hated. " _They are not your_ smert' pitayushchikhsya tovarishchey*," she hissed, switching momentarily to her native Russian in order to hammer home just what she thought of her husband's extra curricular activities. " _You will not deprive your son of basic human interaction simply because you cannot associate yourself with gentlemen of whose children you could bring yourself to approve. Am I perfectly understood?_ "

Igor's eyes darted away from his wife's for a moment while he fidgeted in a very uncharacteristic way, trying to find a way to answer her question without sounding like a child who's just been reprimanded by his mother. He cleared his throat and tugged at his collar again before finally muttering a terse apology under his breath.

Vitolya's flames brightened. " _Apparently, I have_ _not made myself understood_ enough," she said, taking a swift breath to continue her lecture, probably in a louder tone of voice and possibly in English simply to embarrass him into a real apology.

Alarm bells went off in Igor's head at that sight, and he hurriedly placed both hands on his wife's shoulders. " _I understand_ ," he said, with conviction this time. " _I understand, and I apologize_."

His wife paused for a moment and watched him with a disbelieving expression before finally letting out the breath she had taken to continue the argument. She no longer appeared to be furious with him, but she was far from appeased, of which the arms crossed over her chest were evidence. Unfortunately, Igor's only mechanism for dealing with an angry Vitolya was to stay out of her way until she cooled down.

Igor wished vaguely, for the umpteenth time that evening, that _he_ could cool down. He'd gone and enraged the one person who had been helping him keep his sweating under control, and now was standing in the awkward silence left in the wake of his own foul mood. Now unable to speak with his wife without risking her ire, he took to looking around the room for any signs of his son. Had he had the choice, Igor would have left Semyon in the more-than-capable hands of his nanny, but Vitolya was right that the boy had no friends of his own, and he probably wouldn't have until he was old enough to attend Durmstrang.

As his wife had predicted, his son and the four other boys who had been brought to the gala were haunting a table filled with sweet treats and a crystal bowl of presumably child-friendly something-or-other to drink. Lucius' son was easy to pick out of the pack with his bright, blond hair, and Zabini's boy with his dark skin, but Igor didn't recognize the other two. They didn't look particularly witty, but they didn't look particularly dangerous.

But then, Igor reminded himself, what seven-year-olds do? Every man in the room, presuming he hadn't crawl from the primordial ooze of a devil's filth like Igor was certain Lucius Malfoy had done, had once been seven years old.

Igor sighed and turned from his son, who was awkwardly integrating himself into the other boys' group, and back to his wife. Vitolya was standing—still with her arms over her chest—with her body turned just barely away from him at an angle that indicated she was still on his side, but still upset with him. He struggled for several moments, trying to think of something to say to apologize for his thoughtlessness before finally gulping down the champagne he was still holding and disposing of it on another disembodied tray.

He clapped his hands together twice, cupping them just the right way to make the sound echo in the enormous hall. In a voice that boomed from deep within his chest, he shouted, "Just vat sort of a party is this, anyvay? Vat is a ball vithout music?"

With a swift movement, he flicked his wand in the air and a sourceless melody played by a string orchestra filled the air with a lively tune. He swept his wife—who was still quite startled by the sudden activity—into his arms and twirled her into an unsteady waltz that grew in certainty as Vitolya regained her wits and stepped in time with him.

" _I'm sorry_ ," he told her gently, " _that I'm such an old miser_."

Vitolya accepted this without speaking, though she looked skeptical as they danced, so Igor went on.

" _Only a few more years of these parties and these fools before they can all finally accept the truth. Our cause died six years ago with Him, and there is no reviving it. Then, my angel,_ " he said, spinning her away and then back in, " _we can live in peace. I promise._ "

* * *

* - _smert' pitayushchikhsya tovarishchey_ loosely translates from Russian into "death-eating companions."


End file.
